Project Andrea

For this project we worked with Andrea to redesign her existing website for her occupational therapy business, KentOT4Kids.

Andrea approached us & asked us to take a look at her current business website as she wasn’t happy with it. She wanted a website design that better reflected KentOT4Kids, that was better designed, & that was more appealing to her customers.

Read through our approach below to see how we worked with Andrea to redesign, build & launch her new business website.

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Website design

Research

To kickoff this project, we began by taking our time to look through her existing website. We wanted to understand the existing user experience of her website before we met with Andrea.

We also wanted to get a feel of the type of person that she was & what the business stood for from the website too before we met. We felt that this was important as for many of her customers, this is the experience that they would have.

This is what we found – here’s a couple of screenshots of her existing website –

One of the first things that we noticed was that it looked a little dated. It also wasn’t mobile friendly & was quite ‘dry’. To us it didn’t say “reach out to us, we can help you”.

We’re also lucky that through personal experience we know what an Occupational Therapist does & what occupational therapy is – but we felt that this wasn’t clear in the current website. It was quite technical & professionally written.

Understanding Andrea

After we had got a good understanding of her website, we then did what we always do, we sat down with Andrea to meet her, to understand who she is, to understand what KentOT4Kids is about – it’s WHY – & to learn from Andrea about what she wanted from her new site.

Andrea gave us a quite an open steer – she told us that she didn’t like her current site, & that she never really had, & that she wanted something that “looked better”. She had looked at other websites & had got ‘website envy’!

Brand design

KentOT4Kids had a strong brand already, so we didn’t need to look at changing that. Instead we used that as inspiration.

We looked at her current logo & branding style & realised that this was not conveyed on the website at all. Her current logo is bright, colourful, engaging & illustrates that they work with & for children. The current website does not do that.

Here is the KentOT4Kids logo –

This became our first design guideline. We needed to design her a website that does all of that. It needs to be bright, colourful, engaging & illustrate that they work with & for children.

We also took the colour scheme of the logo & used this as the colour palette for the new website. We didn’t want to use all the colours included, instead, we used the range of colours to give us the freedom to create a good mix on the new site.

Existing customers

During our conversation with Andrea we wanted to understand the customers of the business. Who buys services form KentOT4Kids & how did they find out about KentOT4Kids?

We learnt that most of their customers were parents who paid privately for occupational therapy input for their child. We also learnt that a significant number of other parents use the assessment reports from KentOT4Kids to demand support from their local education, health & care services. We needed to ensure that both of these were clearly reflected in the new site.

We also felt that from our own experiences & user research, that in the first contact with KentOT4Kids, most parents do not actually understand what occupational therapy is, what an occupational therapist does, & what kind of therapy the parents can do themselves with their child. This became our design guideline number two – the website had to clearly illustrate & show what an OT is & what they do.

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Getting started

Once we had set out the design guidelines, created our colour palette, conducted user experience & got to know Andrea & KentOT4Kids better, we set about planning the new site.

The first thing we thought about was what we felt people needed to know. And then we looked at how people would want to read it. From this, we created a navigation structure that was simple, clear & concise.

From our research we worked on the basis that most people who visit the website are likely to be new customers for Andrea so we could assume that they would not know a lot about occupational therapy. The customers we spoke to knew, or thought they knew, the basics about occupational therapy when they first contacted KentOT4Kids, but most did not have a good understanding.

At this point we were also very clear that in order of us to fully reflect the work of an occupational therapist we would need photos to go alongside the text. So we arranged to take photos at one of Andrea’s sessions with three children. This would give us a good range of therapy styles that she uses across a couple of age ranges. Using photos would also add extra colour to the site & would be more engaging.

Once we had the photos, we started to rework the text that Andrea already had in her existing site. We looked very closely at what was there. To do this, we printed it off on A3 (a free design tip here as we work better like this!), read through what she had previously written & asked ourselves the key question – would a parent of a child with additional needs understand what was written quickly & easily, & then make contact with Andrea? And we decided that the text needed some work.

We specifically concentrated on two aspects in the text – readability & understanding.

The text had to be quick & easy to read. To help with this we used headings, broke the sentences down, & made it friendlier.

The text also had to be easy to understand. To help with this we explained some of the technical words used & linked them off to specific therapy websites so a parent could research more if they wanted to. We did this in our research, so we wanted to save parents the hassle of having to copy the text & then Googling it!

We also added a smaller photo gallery into the footer of every page along with links to the relevant registrations & memberships that Andrea has to ensure that parents could easily trust that Andrea is a qualified & regulated professional. This was something that came up in our user experience.

We also used the photos from our photo shoot as heading images on the pages to give the website ‘life’ & a more human touch. We also felt that this consistent use of photos of the therapy would help parents better understand occupational therapy.

Next steps

After doing all of this, we felt that there was something missing. We needed to make it even easier for parents to understand & relate to KentOT4Kids. And we needed to help create a level of trust between KentOT4Kids & parents as early as possible too.

To help us do that, we have started to work with Andrea on two new elements to the site –

1/ testimonials – to help with this we are creating a short, independent & impartial feedback system for KentOT4 that we would administer2/ child profiles – to show the range of children that KentOT4Kids work with & an example of the therapy interventions that they have had

We are working on these now so they should be live on the site shortly.

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How does Project Andrea help us live OUR WHY?

OUR WHY is to use the power of creativity to make futures better today.

Andrea created KentOT4Kids to help give children their best possible start in live & to help their parents provide them with the care, support & therapy input that they need.

We helped her put her WHY into action so that she can work with more children with additional needs & their parents to make their futures better today.